A Father, a Daughter, and the Attempt to Change the Census
At around half past nine on the last day of September, Stephanie Hofeller was parked at a Speedway in Kentucky, where she lives, when she got a strange sense that she should Google her father, whom she hadn’t seen in more than four years. One of the first results that popped up was an obituary…
Russell Westbrook, Kawhi Leonard, Anthony Davis, and the N.B.A. Kaleidoscope
The era of N.B.A. superstars being empowered to choose the teams that they play for with free agency began when Oscar Robertson’s antitrust lawsuit, initiated in 1970, was settled in 1976. The era of superstars also functioning as their own team builders began when LeBron James, then of the Cleveland Cavaliers, staged a live television…
Trump’s Very Big, Very Important White House Social-Media Summit
Our country has never been perfect, but most of us can remember a simpler time, just a few years ago, when we more or less knew how to talk to each other, how to convey basic information, how to acquire simple facts about the world. Then came social media. Now every video might be a…
The New Space Race: NASA, China, and Jeff Bezos
Listen with: iTunes WNYC Stitcher TuneIn This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11, the NASA mission that first put men on the moon. In the decades since Apollo 11, the American space program has atrophied. No manned American space mission has left low Earth orbit since 1972. But recent developments in the space…
The Case for Declaring a National Climate Emergency
On Tuesday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders announced their proposal for a resolution declaring a national climate emergency. The timing was appropriate. Ten years ago, President Obama travelled to Denmark to pledge to the world that by 2020, through the Copenhagen Accord, the United States would reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions seventeen per cent…
U.K. Unable to Find Replacement Ambassador Who Does Not Think Trump Is an Idiot
LONDON (The Borowitz Report)—Following the resignation of its Ambassador to the United States, Kim Darroch, the government of the United Kingdom has disclosed that it has been unable to find a replacement for Darroch who does not also think that Donald J. Trump is a blithering idiot. At a press conference at 10 Downing Street,…
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, July 9th
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The Beautiful Uncertainty of Douglas Crimp
In a 2007 interview with the writer Sarah Schulman, the art historian Douglas Crimp said that he was “temperamentally just so put off by certainty, by political certainty.” Crimp died on July 5th, at the age of seventy-four. He has and will be memorialized as a visionary curator, historian, and philosopher of art. But, for…
Will Los Angeles Lose a Beloved Piece of Public Art?
Los Angeles still gets to ask itself regularly what kind of city it wants to be. For instance: Does it believe in large-scale, outdoor, egalitarian public art? In 2001, the artist Mark di Suvero installed “Declaration,” a twenty-five-ton sculpture, on the boardwalk at Venice Beach. Just over sixty feet tall, made from raw-steel I-beams, the…